Brexit will dam­age the coun­try, says Ann Cl­wyd

VET­ERAN Welsh MP Ann Cl­wyd is get­ting stuck into one more epic bat­tle as she makes the case that her party should op­pose Brexit.

The 80-year-old Cynon Val­ley MP was re-elected last month with a ma­jor­ity of 13,238 and she is adamant that leav­ing the EU will be bad news for her con­stituents.

Ms Cl­wyd orig­i­nally op­posed Bri­tish mem­ber­ship but served as an MEP and is now con­vinced that the coun­try should change its mind about leav­ing the 28-mem­ber union.

Labour’s man­i­festo stated the party “ac­cepts the ref­er­en­dum re­sult” and com­mit­ted it to build­ing “a close co-oper­a­tive fu­ture re­la­tion­ship with the EU, not as mem­bers but as part­ners”.

How­ever, Ms Cl­wyd wants her party to now op­pose Brexit.

She said: “It is per­fectly le­git­i­mate to op­pose any course of ac­tion that will be bad for Bri­tain, that dam­ages our econ­omy and de­stroys jobs. And all the ev­i­dence is it’s go­ing to do pre­cisely that.”

Mak­ing the case for a bold change in po­si­tion, she said: “We should not go along with what is turn­ing out to be a Con­ser­va­tive catas­tro­phe. If we’re told there are acute wor­ries in man­u­fac­tur­ing, in farm­ing, uni­ver­si­ties, avi­a­tion, hos­pi­tals and en­ergy and else­where, then we should dis­tance our­selves from such a dis­as­ter now.

“Labour has al­ready said it won’t vote for a Brexit set­tle­ment that fails to se­cure ex­actly the same ben­e­fits as we have now in re­la­tion to the Euro­pean sin­gle mar­ket. The like­li­hood of achiev­ing that is minis­cule.

“That is likely to be one of the many ma­jor fail­ures. Labour has al­ready made it clear that such a sce­nario would be a catas­tro­phe but I feel we should be mak­ing it clear now that we op­pose Brexit full stop.”

Ms Cl­wyd ar­gues that “in a democ­racy it’s al­ways pos­si­ble for peo­ple to think again and choose an­other di­rec­tion”.

Labour would be at­tacked for re­ject­ing the ref­er­en­dum re­sult if it backed stay­ing in the EU, but Ms Cl­wyd said: “[It] was an ad­vi­sory vote won by a very nar­row ma­jor­ity on the ba­sis of what turned out to be a pack of lies”.

Labour MPs who want such a sig­nif­i­cant change in pol­icy can ex­pect strong op­po­si­tion.

For­mer Europe Min­is­ter and Labour MP Car­o­line Flint last week called on her party to “move on” and “em­brace Brexit and build poli­cies that meet the chal­lenge”.

In the text of a speech for the Pol­icy Ex­change think tank, she said: “We need to be straight with peo­ple on Brexit. We know [Theresa] May called the elec­tion on the lie that the op­po­si­tion par­ties would block Brexit. Yet only 114 MPs had voted not to trig­ger Ar­ti­cle 50. And Jeremy [Cor­byn] said at the out­set of the elec­tion, the is­sue of Bri­tain leav­ing was set­tled.

“Now May has lost a ma­jor­ity, we can­not change tack, or try to sug­gest that any­thing less than full mem­ber­ship of the sin­gle mar­ket and cus­toms union is a hard Brexit.

“Those who aim to keep us in the sin­gle mar­ket know full well that this is EU mem­ber­ship in all but name.

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